Abstract :
This study investigates how distributed team members evaluate their own and
others’ knowledge when they engage in goal-directed activities and seek shared
understanding. Twenty-three manager-level employees of a municipal
organisation worked as two distributed teams for two months. Their work was
supported with a visualisation tool, which was embedded in the teams’ shared
www-based workspaces. After the distributed working period, the subjects
were interviewed and their work in the shared workspace was traced.
Qualitative analysis of the interviews showed that, in distributed collaboration,
individuals use both self-evaluation and interpersonal evaluation strategies
when trying to gain an awareness of others’ knowledge. The interpersonal
evaluations included strategies such as assessing the expertise and knowledge
of others. It is concluded that when individuals do not have situational
information, eg, what others think about the content of the shared task, they
tend to make personal attributions. In other words, their evaluations of the
others’ knowledge focus on stable tendencies like the expertise of other
individuals.
